Education Featured Article

February 01, 2013

Conterra's Strategic Alliance to Benefit E-Rate Eligible Institutions

By Mini Swamy, TMCnet Contributor

Conterra Broadband Services currently provides services to over 1,000 K-12 schools, colleges, government and commercial sites throughout the United States, serving over one million students, teachers and administrators.

But, with 'Hosted VoIP' becoming the standard telephony platform for E-Rate eligible institutions, Conterra jumped on to Jive Communications' cloud-based platform, which claims to deliver the most reliable hosted communication services in the industry.

The combined solution is available now to schools and libraries seeking services for E-Rate Year 16 cycle. Equipped with an enterprise-class hosted phone system tailored to suit their educational needs, these institutions will benefit from a lower total cost of ownership.

“Jive's Hosted VoIP offering is a perfect complement to our broadband wide area network (WAN) service and allows Conterra to offer a feature rich, turnkey voice solution to our clients," said Van Snowdon, executive vice president for Conterra Broadband Services.

Hosted VoIP has been on the FCC’s (News - Alert) Eligible Services Listsince 2007, and is fully eligible for Priority 1 discounts.

This strategic alliance, which will combine Jive's voice and video products with Conterra's networking abilities, is expected to provide a cost-effective and high-value solution for public sector organizations throughout the U.S. and also enable access to a more comprehensive suite of connectivity solutions.

"We are very pleased to be working with Conterra. They have a proven track record of successfully serving their customers' infrastructure needs," said John Pope, CEO of Jive Communications.

Jive built and maintains its proprietary, cloud-based communications platform, and is regarded as one of the fastest growing companies in the Unified-Communications-as-a-Service industry.

Centina Systems, a provider of service assurance and service quality management solutions for communications service providers worldwide, announced the successful deployment of its NetOmnia solution for Conterra Broadband Services. NetOmnia will provide a comprehensive, end-to-end fault and performance management solution for their nationwide mobile backhaul network